By John Prigent

This is good! Here we have a proper presentation of the French soldier of the Revolutionary Wars, something that’s been conspicuously lacking before. The enthusiastic volunteers tell in their own words how they were recruited and trained, their preparations for war and entry into battle, and how they got through the Terror. With masses of quotations from first-person memoirs this is as good as it gets!

The illustrations are quite clearly partly contemporary and partly 19th Century romanticism, and the only weak point of the book is that it doesn't say when each one was produced. Mistakes would therefore be easy to make if one relied on them for details of figures. The very good colour plates make up for this, though, some showing details of uniforms and equipment and others being splendidly atmospheric set-pieces.

But there's not just atmosphere here. The book also includes diagrams of parade formations, with positions marked for the various officers and NCOs, at pre-war and wartime establishments for a company of fusiliers. For good measure there's a diagram of the proper camp layout for a full battalion - just what vignette modellers need to avoid getting the cookfires in the wrong places, or the Major's tent next to the cantiniere's post. And as extra icing on the cake there's a table of that frightful Revolutionary calendar with its eleven months of three ten-day weeks, plus a five-day holiday period. It was adopted in fervour and ignored for all non-official purposes by everyone who could get away with it. So if you read that such-and-such happened on XV Vendemiare and want to know what the real date was, here's where to turn for the answer! (September 6, actually).

Very highly recommended to anyone interested in the French Revolution, its foot soldiers and its wars.